Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9 [OLD VERSION]

by Sony

Product Features

• Edit standard and high-definition video
• Produce DVDs with custom menus and graphics
• Share movies on Blu-ray Disc, iPod, online, and more
• Easy to use Show Me How tutorials

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B001CPFWI2
• Item model number: SPVMS9000
• Date first available at Amazon.com: June 17, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,671 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
  • #61 in Software > Video & Music > Digital Video > Video Editing

Product Description

Vegas Movie Studio Platinum Edition software has everything needed to produce spectacular HD movies. Powerful tools for video compositing, color correction, and surround sound mixing help you get feature-film results in your home studio. To share, upload movies to YouTube, burn to Blu-ray Disc, or author DVDs with custom menus and graphics.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 47 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Vidoe Editing Software, October 6, 2008

By 

GAD "bogeyman62" (Charlotte, NC USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9 [OLD VERSION] (DVD-ROM)

This is an excellent product for the home video producer. I have successfully used it to produce a 40 minute high definition video. My video camera is the Sony HDR-HC9 high definition camcorder. This camcorder records in 1440 x 1080, 16:9 aspect ratio. The software detected my camera automatically and captures and writes back to the camera without any problems.

I produced two outputs. One was a high definition video output back to the HDR-HC9 tape camcorder. When played through the HDMI cable connected to my Samsung HDTV, the results were outstanding. I could not see any difference in the quality of the video between the original recorded tape, and the rendered completed production.

My second output for the same video was to a Standard Definition DVD. When I played this DVD on an up-converting 1080p OPPO DVD player, the results were very good on the Samsung HDTV. It would take a sharp eye to tell the difference from the tape version.

I did not produce a blue-ray DVD as I do not have a blue ray DVD player.

The software does not require a supercomputer to run. My computer is a six year old Dell Dimension 8200, 2.0 GHz, 1 Gig memory, with a 120 Gig Hard Drive with 80 gig free memory. The software never crashes. When I produced my DVD movie, it automatically launched the included DVD Architect module without any problems. When capturing and rendering a movie, I made the follwoing adjustments: disable all network connections; shut down anti-virus and anti-spyware programs; disabled my sreen saver. I did this to maximize available memory and to prevent any interuptions to the capturing and rendering process. I did not experience any dropped frames.

The rendering time for producing the tape output movie was about 5 to one. It took 200 minutes to render a 40 minute movie, and another 40 minutes to write it to tape in the videocam. The rendering time for producing the standard definition DVD was quite a bit longer, about 8 hours for the 40 minute movie, plus another 10 minutes to write it out to the DVD. Since this is usually the last step in the movie production process, it is not a problem. I just do the final DVD rendering overnight.

I assume rendering times are reduced if you have a more powerful computer. All editing functions performed without problems and very quickly.

The software can also be opened in two instances which allows you to produce sub-projects and then copy and paste them into a final production.

The learning curve is modest, but if you have used other video editing software, you should be able to get going in a few days. I had previously tried another product offered by Amazon (Corel ULead) but it kept crashing and did not interface correctly with my Sony HD video camera. Fortunately, Amazon gave me a full refund and I switched to Vegas Movie Studio. I would highly recommend it.

My final advice to high definition movie makers: use a tripod.

39 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Software for AVCHD editing, September 9, 2008

By 

Andrew J. Stafford (Saint Louis, MO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9 [OLD VERSION] (DVD-ROM)

For those of you who are looking to edit AVCHD video I cannot recommend this software enough. I purchased Vegas 9 to edit video shot on my Canon HG10 AVCHD camcorder after being disappointed with Nero Ultimate (the renderings had interlacing problems in non-still shots). Being new to video editing, I didn't find the interface in Vegas very intuitive at first. However, after watching a few youtube tutorial videos I became quite comfortable in the environment. Also, Vegas 9 has some built-in tutorials for basic editing that I found quite helpful.

Don't just take my word for it, you can TRY it first for 30 days if you download the trial from Sony's website. I have a pretty powerful computer (Quad core, 4G RAM, 9800 GTX) so you might want to test it on your system before purchasing for AVCHD editing.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but CRASHES when hitting the 2GB memory limit, May 17, 2010

By 

Stockstradr "Stockstradr" (Bay Area) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9 [OLD VERSION] (DVD-ROM)

I used this software for six months. I am COMPELLED to post this review after discovering what many experienced users know - about the major software bug in all versions of Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum 9. I believe even the expensive "pro" version is affected. There IS a complex fix to this bug, but you should evaluate if you are comfortable implementing what many will consider a "complex" and risky fix.

Sony was apparently too lazy to correct the software's inability to access beyond 2GB of your PC's RAM for most versions of Windows. This is the problem. They KNOW of this bug. Fixing this probably requires they re-write huge sections of code.

Since Sony Vegas cannot utilize more than 2 GB of your PC's RAM, then it will crash when rendering requires more. For example, when you directly edit AVCHD (particularly 1080x1920), Sony Vegas will OFTEN CRASH while rendering to most formats (during the Make Movie phase). A typical example: I dropped just five clips onto the video timeline, for a total length only FIVE minutes long. The source video was 1080x1920p 24fps AVCHD. Sony Vegas was ONLY able to successfully render that 5-minute clip into Windows Media 512 Kbps 320x240 video, and sometimes successfully into MainConcept AVC/AAC *mp4 at 640x480 (typical iPhone-suitable format). So LOW res rendering was OK.

Yet, it could NOT render to any higher-res format because it would lock-up and crash part-way through the render, every time. It couldn't even get that five-minute movie rendered out at 720p. It wasn't about THAT video clip; i encoutered this error hundreds of times with various video clips rendering to a wide variety of formats! That is pathetic for a piece of software that claims in every manual and marketing document to support editing native HDV/AVCHD files and exporting to multiple HD formats.

You think my PC is too slow? Guess again. I'm running an i7 920 quad-core CPU clocked to 2.7 GHz, with 12 GB SDRAM DDR3 1600Mhz. That's one of the fastest CPU's you can buy, coupled with tons of RAM; what's more, it has a very fast read/write RAID10 hard drive array, plus a super-fast 160GB Intel X25-M SSD (which I edit my video files from). So my PC is screamin' fast and fully configured; so the bug isn't due to limitations of my PC. I'm running Vista 64-bit, but this bug shows up when installed on multiple other versions of windows! This is all reported in the Sony Vegas software user forums.

I found the software fix on the sonycreativesoftware web site, under the Support > Forums.

NOTE: once I implemented this fix, the problem was INSTANTLY SOLVED: Sony Vegas could immediately render to any format without crashing. Ah, but you need to see how complex the fix is. I'm a Dilbert type; I didn't find the fix complex, but many non-geeks will find this fix too complex.

Go to the forums at site sonycreativesoftware, go to Support > Forums , then bring up the FULL search menu (not the single-field search that is at the top right of the window) Then in the "Search Words:" field you should search for "How to fix render crashes"

Look for posts by "Mad Pierre", or "david_f_knight" or "blink3times"

This fix involves downloading CFF Explorer from ntcore, installing it, then running CFFExplorer as Administrator and MANUALLY re-setting the 2GB limit flag in about FIVE different Sony Vegas run files so they can handle > than 2gig address space.

You should find the detailed instructions in the forums before attempting.

MY ADVICE:

-if you have the money to burn, then just buy something like Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, because you know Adobe worked these kind of major bugs out of its video editing software; Adobe Premiere pro is well known to be stable.
-You could buy Sony Vegas Pro 9, expensive yes but at least a little less expensive than Adobe Premiere Pro CS4, and use a custom encoder like MainConcept which the pro users claim fixes these 2GB stability problems. But you need the Sony Vegas Pro 9 version in order to customize the encoder. I would buy Adobe Premiere before I would buy Sony Vegas Pro.
-If you do NOT have the money for Adobe Premiere Pro and are thinking about Sony Vegas Platinum 9, then I recommend you first assess if you are computer-savvy enough to implement the bug fix detailed in the Sony Vegas forums (see above). Don't forget that manually editing those files has unknown risks.
-You could buy Cineform Neo Scene (or similar) to convert all your source AVCHD files (and other formats!) to avi, then directly edit the avi files in Sony Vegas. On my system (and others report the same) this method also COMPLETELY eliminated the crashes during rendering. Editing avi files also has the benefit eliminating the slowing and frame stutter you see when previewing your timeline movie on a second monitor in "good" or "best" full-screen mode (assuming your PC is fast enough). This is because the avi files are far-less CPU-intensive for Sony Veges to work with. (AVCHD video is highly compressed and CPU-intensive for video editing software to work with). Don't forget to set aside MULTIPLE Terabytes of archive disc space, because of the HUGE file size of the avi versions of your AVCHD files. Yet, all that won't solve all crashes; you'll still crash anytime Sony Vegas needs more than 2GB RAM to render.

THINK ON THIS:

From a software re-write, bug-fix standpoint, it would have been EASY for Sony Vegas to fix this in rev 9 - IF the fix merely involves re-setting the 2GB limit flag on say five installed files. Why didn't they? Maybe there is more to it; we may imagine that probably re-setting that 2GB limit flag on those files creates OTHER instabilities that are even worse. Otherwise, Sony Vegas would have already implemented that simple (to geeks that is) fix. However, I will note that I have not encountered any "side-effect" instabilities from the CFFExplorer fix.